King Ken Comes to Conquer

By RICHARD CORLISS

The great doors swing open to reveal the caped figure of King Henry V, sexily backlighted. His bishops and courtiers gaze at him like apostles at the unseen Jesus in some old biblical epic. And finally the monarch of Britain -- and of this robust new movie -- shows his face and speaks. It is an entrance angled to register awe for Kenneth Branagh. But how much awe can a 28-year-old actor, little known outside Britain and directing his first film, expect to inspire? Branagh recalls that when Judi Dench, who plays Mistress Quickly, first saw this scene, "she laughed in my face and said, 'I've never seen an entrance like that! Who do you think you are?' " He retorted, "The film is not called Mistress Quickly the Fourth." No, but it might be called King Ken.

He doesn't look like a Shakespearean matinee idol, this thin-lipped Irishman with puddingy skin and a huge head piked like a pumpkin on his stocky frame. He lacks conventional star magnetism: the athletic abandon, the flaming sexuality, the audacity of interpretation that risks derision to achieve greatness. Expect no swooning teenagers to queue at his stage door, no desperate fan to write him suicide notes. Anyway, he would reject that form of hero worship, for his personality radiates shopkeeper common sense. He is a model of Thatcherite initiative in a British arts scene of radical distemper.

In short, Branagh seems as remote from Laurence Olivier as, say, Sandra Bernhard is from Sarah Bernhardt. Yet the English press praises him -- damns him too -- as "the new Olivier." If the label is unfair to both men (at 28, even Olivier was not yet "Olivier"), it is correct to suggest a family resemblance. For, like Olivier, Branagh has a resume to match his notoriety.

He is the most accomplished, acclaimed and ambitious performer of his generation. In 1984 he dazzled audiences as the youngest actor ever to play the title role in Henry V at the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC ). He starred in the Masterpiece Theater mini-series Fortunes of War. He built his own repertory company and led it through sold-out seasons in London and the provinces. He has written two plays and an autobiography, Beginning. He even married his leading lady, TV star Emma Thompson. No doubt about it: Branagh has conquered Britain.

This week he invades U.S. movie theaters (in New York City and Los Angeles, with a dozen other cities to follow next month). He will buck the odds as he did when making his film -- as Henry V did on his French campaign -- and with no smaller an appetite for success. Did Olivier make a landmark film of Henry V when he played in and directed it in 1944? Then the new Olivier would do it again -- bloodier and maybe better -- in hopes of luring the unlettered moviegoer for whom Shakespeare is a synonym for Sominex.

Just to make the challenge sporting, Branagh would plan his film while starring in three roles with his Renaissance Theater Company. And he would shoot his Henry, for a pinchpenny $7.5 million, in seven weeks, less than a third of the time Olivier took. On the first day, the novice director didn't know to shout "Action!" until someone poked him in the ribs. How could he make a decent film under so daunting a shadow?

Well, he's done it: created a Henry for a decade poised between belligerence and exhaustion. He found a camera style that illuminates the actors with torch power and Rembrandt lighting. His elite cast reads like a Burke's Peerage of British acting: stage eminences Paul Scofield, Ian Holm, Derek Jacobi, Alec McCowen and Robert Stephens; TV comedians Richard Briers and Robbie Coltrane; Brian Blessed and Christopher Ravenscroft from Branagh's RSC Henry; most of his own rep company; and his bright bride Emma. This galaxy surrounds a director who, like Henry, can orchestrate a magnificent sally, manipulate diverse talents, bend them to his will. And temper artistry with efficiency: Branagh completed the shooting ahead of schedule and under budget.

Olivier's Henry V, commissioned by the wartime British government, was a handsome piece of morale boosting. It said all the war's a stage. And on this stage a tiny band of English heroes defeated the evil French (read German) army at Agincourt. It's Robin Hood vs. the Nazis. Olivier's pageant was sunny and sumptuous, and so was his Henry: resourceful in battle, generous in victory, ever cheery and brimful of confidence. Why, he might be Kenneth Branagh!

But not Branagh's new Henry. This is a headstrong lad evolving into a strong King. He can betray as well as be kind, renouncing old friends like Falstaff and Bardolph even if it means they die heartbroken. He can threaten rape and murder of the innocents, then summon God to provide divine artillery and lead the English "once more unto the breach." The Agincourt battle, which Olivier staged as a fantasy joust, is a muddy, brutal fellowship of death here. It has the acrid tang of World War I carnage and the guilty aftertaste of victory in the Falklands. In its crafty heart, Henry V is an antiwar war movie.

Henry knows that at Agincourt he has won a great upset, with all of France as his booty. Yet Branagh has to show the awful cost. In an elaborate, chilling tracking shot that lasts nearly four minutes, the exhausted King staggers across the battlefield, the dead weight of Falstaff's boy page across his shoulders, past a tableau of casualties. Instead of a triumph, then, a requiem -- for youthful ideals tested in war and found lacking. Not until film's end, when Henry plays the soldier unsuited to seduction, does the sly dazzle of Branagh's charm break through the heavy clouds of Henry's majesty. He is an earthy Olivier and his worthy avatar.

For the man who would be King, early life did not promise much in the way of spotlights. The Branagh family, working-class Protestants in Belfast, produced craftsmen, not stage stars. Ken's father was a carpenter who moved the family to Reading, England, in 1970, when the Troubles roiled too close to home. Within a year, as Branagh recalls in his breezy autobiography, "I'd managed to become English at school and remain Irish at home." It was his first acting challenge, and it fueled his resolve to perform.

As a student at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, Branagh displayed the salesman's knack of charm and fearlessness -- the seductive intelligence, so crucial to performing, managing and directing. He wrote to Olivier for advice on the role of Chebutykin in Three Sisters. He took notes on playing Hamlet from John Gielgud. He determined to play the Dane at a performance attended by the Queen and Prince Philip. Later, preparing his RSC Henry, he won an audience with Prince Charles at Buckingham Palace to discuss the isolation felt by a national leader. Wooed and won by the young actor, Charles became a patron of the Renaissance.

But there was more to Branagh than blond ambition. Says Hugh Cruttwell, then RADA's principal: "He had all the talent and initiative you can see in full flood now." Other people soon saw it too. Just out of RADA he won the plum role of Judd, the cynical Marxist student in Another Country -- a performance whose laser intelligence and subversive edge announced an actor at the start of a brilliant career. He would fulfill that promise when the RSC's Adrian Noble cast him as Henry V.

"Ken's got the general's gift of being the man you automatically follow," says Richard Briers, who plays Bardolph in the film Henry and will assay King Lear in the Renaissance's tour of the U.S. next year. Branagh needed that royal self-assurance to build a major acting company and mount a large film. He will need more of it to sustain his career at its current velocity. "Quite soon," says Terry Hands, the RSC's artistic director, "Ken must decide whether he will be an admin man or a great actor. If a leading actor is also running the whole show, he's worried about the box office, the creaking floorboard, the divorce of his cast member. All these can sap that tunnel vision, and the performance can become too controlled."

Tunnel vision is no problem for Branagh -- but in the service of the play, not the perks. "I'm not interested in being rich and famous," he avers, "in smoking a big cigar and driving a big car. I want to stay human-size, just as I wanted to make Henry V as manlike as possible." He plans to shoot two films in 1991: a Shakespeare comedy, perhaps Much Ado About Nothing, and a modern story set in Chicago. Meanwhile, he may write a novel. And at night he will read himself to sleep with a good book.

So we ask: What are you reading these days? "Wuthering Heights," he replies. Ah, yes. Hollywood made a movie from that one 50 years ago, and made a star of the actor who played Heathcliff. Larry something. What ever happened to him?

With reporting by Anne Constable/London